Saturday, March 12, 2016

Persistent

I posted this on my Facebook, on 11 March around midnight, a few hours before leaving Tokyo.

It is past midnight in Tokyo, and today the country will mark the 5th anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, and of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe that struck Japan on 11 March 2011. As I was walking the street after a meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Tokyo yesterday morning and passed the Ministry of Energy, Trade and Industry (the famous METI), I spotted the anti-nuclear tent installed there and maintained by Japanese activists for 1643 days (if my calculator is correct, that's 4.5 years).

I stopped and chatted for a few minutes with the activists on shift.This action alone is not going to resolve the issue it addresses (of course). But one thing you can say of anti-nuclear activists is that they are as persistent as Plutonium. And this is good.